J. Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Exploration

SCOTT LYALL

Writing to his future wife Rebecca ‘Rhea’ Middleton from the Royal Army Service Corps main supply depot in Jerusalem, 16 January 1921, a twenty-year-old Leslie Mitchell called himself ‘a child of the wanderlust’, claiming that he ‘would be cramped and stifled in one position all my life, [and] would hunger for the freedom, the wider spaces of the Earth’.[1] His four years in the army certainly allowed Mitchell to feed some of that hunger: he travelled to various countries in the Middle East andCentral Asia, including Palestine, Egypt, Persia and India,[2] during a period in which he became interested in Egyptology and the anthropological theory diffusionism.[3]Mitchell’s first short stories, published in the Cornhill Magazine from January 1929, focus heavily on the Middle East;[4]in these, and in much of his longer fiction written under his own name, there is an exploratory − and utopian– impulse.This takes the characters to Egypt in The Lost Trumpet (1932).Likewise, in Mitchell’s first novel, the semi-autobiographical Stained Radiance (1930), John Garland sits ‘on top of the Grand Pyramid of Gizeh’ during his tour of Egypt with the Air Force.[5]The central protagonist of Mitchell’s The Thirteenth Disciple (1931), Malcom Maudslay, bears the surname of the explorer Alfred Maudslay (1850−1931), who would reveal much about the ancient Mayan civilisation; the real-life Maudslay played a key role in deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics,[6] a subject Mitchell would examine in his anthropological work The Conquest of the Maya (1934). Gershom and Ester in Mitchell’s Image and Superscription (1933),a novelinfluenced strongly by diffusionism and the work of Alfred Maudslay, travel to British Honduras to seek the lost Mayan culture.Again under the influence of diffusionism, Mitchell explores the fantastical possibilities of travelling to other times and places in his science fiction, going back to Atlantis in Three Go Back (1932), and forward in time to a pastoral arcadia in Gay Hunter (1934).Mitchell’s first book was the non-fiction Hanno, or The Future of Exploration. This ‘child of the wanderlust’ began– and would continue − his writing career as an explorer. In that beginning were the seeds of many of the major interrelated themes that were to concern him in thenon-fiction books on exploration written by Mitchell and Lewis Grassic Gibbon examined here: the myth of the Golden Age; the beginnings of Western civilisation and colonialism;and the quest, ultimately spiritual in nature, to reconcile his own personal alterity (‘English’ Mitchell, Scottish Gibbon), his sense of himself as a Scot, with the alterity, the unknowableness of other cultures.

Hannowas published in 1928 by Kegan Paul in their ‘Today and To-morrow’ series. Many of the books in the series look through the lens of the past as a means to speculate on possible futures. Looking backwards in order to look forwards is something that informs the work of Mitchell and Gibbon, as it doesmodernism more generally; as Marshall Berman, writing of modernism and modernity, comments: ‘going back can be a way to go forward’.[7] In fact, the Mitchell/Gibbon oeuvre comes full circle: Hanno, Mitchell’s first book, links to his last published work, Nine Against the Unknown (1934), in their shared focus onexplorers and exploration, as well as through the use of a quotation from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. Although, as Gibbon’s biographer points out, the joint authorship of Nine Against the Unknown was a ‘gimmick [that] annoyed more than it deceived, and the pseudo-collaboration invited sarcasm’ in the press reviews,[8] it is fittingthat the book was written by J. Leslie Mitchell and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.[9] For Berman, ‘All forms of modernist art and thought have a dual character: they are at once expressions of and protests against the process of modernization.’[10] Thisis decidedly true of Mitchell’s and Gibbon’s work, particularly that on exploration.

Hanno is a short, speculative bookconcernedwith the future of exploration. It is characterised by a metaphysical yearning, a spiritual questing, and asearching in the past for the source of a utopian future that appears throughout Mitchell’s work in particular, but also in Gibbon’s. Peter Whitfield says of Mitchell that he ‘was, in an undirected sense, a very religious man, but one who could never find his god’.[11] This is, perhaps, to misconstrue the nature of Mitchell’s undoubted religiosity. His god could never be final or absolute because it was the quest itself that was the aim for Mitchell, not the coming home. Mitchell’s love of exploration is fundamental to the quest in all of his work, which is ultimately a quest for that which must always remain unknown: the future.Hanno is probably Mitchell’s worst literary undertaking, but it is here that we witness the genesis of his spiritual endeavour in quest of the unknown that continued until his last book. This spiritual search is, for Mitchell in Hanno, integral to ‘the explorer’s mental equipment’, along with ‘that half-unreasoning dream-pursuit, that aching wonder, that nameless urge’.[12] The ideal explorer, Mitchell believes, is poet, seeker and child combined. Yet the explorer must also be a writer, one who documents that which has been found. For Mitchell, ‘the recording, as well as the apprehension, of the geographically unknown, is a necessary qualification of exploration’ (H, p.14).

Mitchell calls Hanno, the Carthaginian explorer and colonist who sailed ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’ to round the north-west coast of Africa, ‘the first explorer on record’ (H, p.14). Mitchell wants future explorers to investigate beneath the oceans, beyond the stars, and below the Earth’s surface. Hanno is in many ways a work of science-fiction become fact, a book of prophecy come true. Although Leonardo da Vinci is credited with designing the prototype of the helicopter as far back as the fifteenth century, an operational model was not in use until the 1930s; Mitchell, writing in 1928, wants explorers to use a ‘helicopter aircraft’ to map Antarctica (H, p. 34). With Wellsian foresight, he envisages that within the next fifty years humans will reach the moon, which indeed the Soviet Union did in 1959 with an unmanned flight, followed by the US manned mission Apollo 11 a decade later. Mitchell even correctly anticipates the designated site for lunar landings, Oceanus Procellarum. While wrong in his satiric prediction that ‘the main explosive force behind the projectile may be Signor Mussolini in pursuit of an Italian Empire’, Mitchell guessed right that there would be an imperial space race to land on the moon (H, p. 84). For Mitchell, writing of the future of exploration, our very future as a species lies in exploration. He believes in a materialist, communist future where ‘Science and order will rule’ and ‘the snarling buffooneries of competition have given place to the sanities of universal co-operation’ (H, p. 23). Yet even in that ‘sane world’, explorers in the ‘tradition of Hanno’, the ‘mad admiral’, will still seek the unknown (H, pp. 22, 93, 14).

In Nine Against the Unknown, Mitchell writes biographical sketches of those explorers who followed in the ‘tradition of Hanno’ in their pursuit of the unknown. Subtitled ‘A Record of Geographical Exploration’, the book is actually less about the explorations themselves and more about the explorers,their psychological and emotional motivations. Here we find no dry mapping of previously uncharted terrain, but rather the true-life adventure stories of those explorers who were the first Western discoverers of previously unknown lands: Leif Ericsson, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Ferdinand Magellan, Vitus Bering, MungoPark, Richard Burton, and Fridtjof Nansen. William K. Malcolm argues that in Nine Against the Unknown, as in Image and Superscription, Mitchell’s ‘vision acquires an austerity redolent of the Absurd philosophy of Malraux, Camus or Beckett’.[13]This is to misunderstand the nature of Mitchell’s vision, which, whilst non-Christian, is much more romantic quest than existential despair. Malcolm’s point also fails to align Mitchell’s spiritual quest for the unknown to exploration and its concomitant, imperialism.The ‘unknown’ is not only a place that Western eyes have never seen before, an undiscovered land, a new world on which to plant a flag. The unknown also has obvious religious connotations. It is for Mitchell a metaphysical or spiritual no-place, a terra incognita of the mind, that nameless urge to reach beyond our human limits inspiring those acts of exploration described in the book. In that sense, the unknown is an ultimate that is ultimately unreachable. Once found, the sought-for land is displaced elsewhere, and the quest must begin anew. The unknown is a challenge, but, unlike the newly-discovered lands themselves, it is a challenge that can never be conquered. This is why the author characterises the lives of his explorers as ‘tragic epics’.[14]

The quest valorised in Nine Against the Unknown could be interpreted, in postcolonial terms, as the Western project of imperial conquest, with the engaging biographies of the explorers implicitly emphasising the Western individualism at the heart of the colonial mission. Mitchell never ignores the colonial impetus behind, or following on from, exploration. But the heroes of Nine Against the Unknown are not those out for mere loot. The Scot holds to the romance of exploration – ‘the glamour gloriously unescapable’ (NAU, p. 19) – under the influence of the colonial writers, such as Rider Haggard, who were, as Douglas Young has pointed out, the heroes of his boyhood.[15] What the explorers of Nine Against the Unknown are looking for is the legendary Fortunate Isles: ‘a land of geographical fantasy, a land of Youth and Fortune and Gold’ (NAU, p.17).Mitchell recognises, and approves of, the ‘irrational element’ in this quest (NAU, p. 17), and differentiates this from the rational, yet ignoble pursuit of wealth and territory for its own sake. He creates a distinction between ‘the new commercialist orientation of exploration’ – ‘trade, colonization, land-seizing’ (NAU, p. 15) – that hunts gold for profit, and the irrational quest for gold as a giver of life.

The place sought by the explorers of Nine Against the Unknown has been characterised ‘in theology, in folklore, as the Garden of the Hesperides, the Fortunate Isles, Valhalla, Wineland, the Land of Gold’ (NAU, p. 16). According to Mitchell, this utopia ‘was regarded not as a distant land in the skies, not in exact essence the Heaven or Hades of the various mythologies, but as a definite terrestrial paradise’ somewhere in the West (NAU, p. 16) – from Europe, this would be the Americas. This quest for the FortunateIslands is a form of Golden Age mythology and can be found in, amongst other sources, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucian, and in the recurring creative resonance of the Atlantis legend. Gregory Claeys points out that the ‘epic voyage’, such as those undertaken by Odysseus and Aeneas, is ‘a key motif in utopian thought’.[16]Nine Against the Unknown recounts the actual, rather than mythic, epic journeys of explorers whom Mitchell links to the myth of the FortunateIslands. The author’s own quest, political in nature, is to keep alive the idea of a utopian place through which current civilisation can be compared to its detriment. Harry Levin points out that it was during the Renaissance – the beginning of modernity, when ‘the West’ began to define itself as such, in part through the exploration of other lands − that the myth of the Golden Age was resuscitated through the encounter of Western explorers with primitive peoples:

The Middle Ages had buried the golden age under the conception of Eden; the Renaissance not only revived the original conception, but ventured forth on a quest to objectify it. When its locus shifted from the temporal to the spatial, it became an attainable goal and a challenge to the explorers.[17]

The tension haunting Nine Against the Unknown is that these very explorers, romanticised by the Scot as questing after an ideal, were actually the destructive harbingers of imperialism and Western civilisation.

By introducing the quest for the Fortunate Islands as a conscious or subliminal motivating force behind the explorations in Nine Against the Unknown, it could seem as if Mitchell is downplaying the more materialistic and imperialistic concerns of his explorers. These famous explorers in historical time are paralleled with the first primitive explorers of pre-historical time, which, given the author’s rosy, diffusionist view of so-called Natural Man as being decidedly not savage, could tend to idealise somewhat the portrait of the civilised explorers. The book is also a very saleable imperial adventure narrative, full of active, masculine, heroic action. Yet Mitchell does not shy away from the implications of Western exploration for autochthonous peoples, as in this account of the landing of the Genoese Christopher Columbus and his Spanish crew on a Central American island, now called WatlingIsland in the Bahaman archipelago:

The Spaniards saw they had nothing to fear from the natives who flocked about them in simple friendliness. By signs Columbus gathered that the name of the island was Guanahani. Calmly obliterating its name even as he had annexed its territory, he re- christened it San Salvador [Island]. The sun was shining and the air clear and sweet; and looking over the heads of the naked islanders he saw all their land behind them in ‘the likeness of a great garden’. He looked at the children of this second Eden, and for perhaps a while he saw them with strange clarity as the innocent and happy souls they were, paradisal folk whose paradise his coming was to end for ever. (NAU, p. 102)

Gibbon’s biographical writings, as can also be seen in Niger, his Life of the Scottish explorer MungoPark, are filled with authorial projection onto his subjects. Here we look through the eyes of a Christopher Columbus with diffusionist ideas of the islanders. Earlier, Mitchell had imagined how the islanders had felt on seeing the approach of Columbus and his men. In describing the islanders as ‘the last men of the Golden Age that survived in the Central Americas’, ‘simple and kindly children of the earth and sea, Natural Men as once were all our fathers’ (NAU, p.101), he might be accused of imposing on the natives his own, very Western fantasy of paradisal innocence. An embodiment of the Golden Age myth, the islanders will lose their reputed innocence on contact with Westerners in search of paradise; as such, having sullied virgin territory, those Westerners will need to continue their quest for the ever-elusive FortunateIslands. Imperial exploration has for long been characterised as rape of the innocent.[18] And if innocence departs on capture then there is a continual need for ever-new explorations in search of new virgin lands. Seen in this light – and contrary to the idea of the Golden Age as a concept that allows a radical critique of Western civilisation – the myth of the Golden Age is actually the false consciousness of Western expansion, the dream-like illusion masking the ugly realities of Western progress.

In Nine Against the Unknown Mitchell points out that Columbus was not the first European to land in America, that being the Norse explorer Leif Ericsson some five-hundred years earlier. Rather, Columbus’s ‘discovery was not of a New World – which all his life long he strenuously denied and disbelieved. His discovery was of the sailing route across the Atlantic’ (NAU, p. 125). This opening up of America to European migration and influence has had significant intellectual implications:

It meant the vanishing from the minds of men for ever of the flat-earth hypothesis, did that hypothesis still lingeringly endure; it meant the breaking down of a great and elaborate synthesis of thought regarding the earth’s origins, the origins of all men, the connection of the facts of ethnology and history with the Mosaic myths. Nothing has been so fruitful of discussion and discovery as the question of the origins of the Red Indians and their various strange cultures. America, where the last of the great masses of Natural Men – neither savage, barbarian, nor civilized – were encountered as a consequence of the establishment of the transatlantic route, influenced profoundly contemporary and subsequent political and politico-sociological thought. It might be said, indeed, with its influence upon Thomas More and Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists, that Columbus fathered the French Revolution and modern humanitarianism. He was (a ruddy, horrified shade) the godfather of modern Rationalism, the Diffusionist School of History, the philosophy of Anarchism. (NAU, p. 125)

The link forged by Mitchell between the Red Indians, Rousseau and the French Revolution is pointed to by H. J. Massingham.[19] In The Golden Age (1927), an important book for Mitchell, Massingham observes ‘that it was the character of the Red Indians which profoundly influenced the French humanitarian thinkers of the eighteenth century’.[20] The perceived nobility of the Red Indians confirmed for the Encyclopaedists that humanity in a natural state, as it would have lived in the Golden Age, is intrinsically good; it is in fact civilisation that twists human nature, not human nature that is inherently fallen. Massingham recounts the eighteenth-century rediscovery of the Golden Age, claiming that ‘With the reign of the Encyclopaedists over mental France, the Golden Age begins for the first time in history to take its true place in the firmament of ideas’.[21] Of central importance to the Encyclopaedists of the French Enlightenment was a belief in the possibility of human ‘perfectibility’, and an understanding of the key role played by ‘education and social environment’ in the shaping of character and conduct.[22]For Massingham, it was Rousseau who freed the Golden Age from ‘its castle in the air where it lay guarded by [. . .] tradition, authority and ecclesiasticism’,[23] and brought it into philosophical use in the modern humanitarianism of French Enlightenment thinking. Rousseau, says Massingham, made of the Golden Age, traditionally a degenerationist concept, a progressive idea. And, as opposed to the more patrician Voltaire, it was Rousseau’s love of the masses, his belief that no future Golden Age could be worth the name without their happiness, from which grew the republican liberty, equality and fraternity of the French Revolution. Massingham points to the importance of ‘The Theory of Historical Regress’ (1750) and the Discourse on Inequality (1755) as examples of Rousseau’s emphasis on the moral superiority of primitivism. Neither Massingham nor Mitchell use the term ‘Noble Savage’ in relation to the Red Indians; indeed, the Scot explicitly rejects notions of Natural Man’s savagery – although he does connote savagery with certain races (as he understands them to be) of civilisation, such as Leif Ericsson’s Vikings (NAU, p. 21) and the Muslims encountered by Richard Burton (NAU, p. 271).However, the concept of the Noble Savage, which has been popularly attributed to Rousseau, is in many ways implicit in the idea that primitivism is synonymous with goodness.